Edited on Jun 22, 2026

Every few months I get an email from someone in their twenties asking how to build a PR career. Most of the advice they've been given is wrong — or right for a version of the industry that no longer exists.

Here's what I'd tell anyone starting today.

Learn to write before you learn anything else. Not write well. Write fast and clear. The ability to draft a tight pitch email, a sharp press release, a useful internal memo, and a quotable byline is the foundation of the entire craft. Most of the rest is editing the work of someone else who can't do this. If you can, you're worth ten times the salary of someone who can't. Read every Forbes piece in your sector for ninety days. Notice the structure. Copy the moves until they're yours.

Build relationships with reporters before you need them. Cold-pitch the journalist you respect, with a smart angle on a story they're already working. Don't ask for a meeting. Don't ask for a favor. Give them something useful. Do that fifty times in your first year. Some of them will remember you. Those are the relationships that compound for two decades.

Don't specialize too early. The publicists who built the durable careers I admire worked across categories for the first five years. Consumer one quarter, B2B the next, crisis the next. The variety teaches you which patterns repeat and which ones are sector-specific. Specialize too early and you become a category expert with no general instinct. Generalists with depth in one area beat specialists with no breadth, every time.

Learn the AI Communications discipline now. GEO. Citation Share. Schema. The retrieval anchors the engines actually use. This is the version of the industry you're entering, not the one your boss came up in. Most senior practitioners are still learning this layer. If you arrive already fluent, you skip three years of career runway.

Don't confuse the agency name with your career. The first agency on your resume matters less than what you actually do there. A junior at a mid-sized firm with real reps on real accounts beats a junior at a tier-1 firm doing nothing but admin. Pick the role with the closest access to senior practitioners and the most variety of work. The brand name is a halo. The work is the career.

Learn to handle a crisis before you have one. Shadow a crisis call. Read every crisis-comms case study you can find. Understand what the principal actually does in the first six hours. Crisis is where the craft separates from the marketing. Operators who can do it earn the trust — and the fees — that nobody else can.

Read books written by operators. For Immediate Release. David Ogilvy on advertising. Phil Knight's Shoe Dog. Marc Benioff's early Salesforce playbook. The founders and operators who built things wrote about the work. Read those, not the airport leadership books.

Find a mentor who's still doing the work. Not a coach. Not a consultant. An operator who is still in the trenches placing stories, running campaigns, managing crises. The advice from someone who's currently doing the job is worth a hundred times the advice from someone who used to do it. Ask for ten minutes. Offer to bring useful information in exchange. Most operators will say yes.

Treat the first ten years as your investment. The compounding is real. Reporter relationships, sector knowledge, crisis reps, the muscle memory of the craft — all of it pays off in years eleven through thirty. Most people quit at year five because the compound hasn't started yet. Don't be one of them. The career belongs to whoever stays in the work long enough to let the leverage build.

Public relations is one of the few careers that still rewards patience, discipline, and craft over decades. The AI Communications era is rewarding it more, not less.

Build accordingly.

Ronn Torossian is the founder and chairman of 5W AI Communications, the AI Communications Firm. He is the publisher of Everything-PR and the author of two best-selling editions of For Immediate Release.